Tuesday, 17 April 2018

Paddington Turns Detective - for World Book Day

In the supermarket I'm having a look at
the selection of World Book Day Books. Our local supermarket tends to have a
very small selection of books. Usually they’re very popular paperbacks at less
than half the actual price, which is a terrible idea. People get used to the
idea of having very little choice and treating them like junk – but what can
you do? That’s how publishing is run these days, and I’m sure these people know
what they’re doing.

There’s
a Paddington collection for World Book Day, for a pound. The three stories are
all reprints, of course, but I have to buy it anyway. It’s illustrated by Peggy
Fortnum and the stories are from Michael Bond’s heyday. It drops easy as
anything into my basket: irresistible.

There's an older, large lady working at the checkout. Calling me ‘lovey’. When she
scans and beeps ‘Paddington Turns Detective’ she says, with mock sternness, ‘I
hope you’re not going to be reading this yourself.’

I
give her a hard stare. ‘Why ever not?’

She
laughs at me. ‘Isn’t it for kids?’

I
shrug. ‘I’ve no idea. But I’ve got a collection of Paddington books going back
to 1970, when I first started buying books. I’ve got everything he appears in.’

She
beeps the rest of my shopping. ‘I bet they’d be worth a fortune.’

‘I
doubt it,’ I say hotly. ‘Not only are they not for sale, but they’ve all been
read a hundred times. They’re not the kind of thing people sell. They’re my
reading copies.’

‘Oh,’
she says, looking thoughtful. ‘Didn’t they make a film out of Paddington
recently? Did you go and see it, lovey?’

I
tell her that both the film and its sequel were great and more than lived up to
my expectations.

‘Oh,
that’s good,’ she says, as I pack my bag. ‘Because sometimes you go and see the
film and it’s no good at all, compared with the book and the way you imagine
everything inside your head.’

‘Quite,’
I say.

She
sighs. ‘You can have all your illusions squashed.’

Squashed?
I assure her that that’s something I never want to happen to me.

‘You
have a nice afternoon, lovey,’ she tells me, as I pay and she gives me my change
and then I head back out into rainy Levenshulme.